Tag Archives: boundaries

Where is the balance?

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I am having a whole lot of feelings. I am feeling out of sorts and off balance. I feel like I usually struggle with the intensity of spring–that’s a whole thing. But I have additional things weighing in. I am still in my feelings about my mother in law. I need to figure out how to word a deeply emotional appeal to her that is about shaping our relationship going forward. We have been in a much better spot for a while and I want to continue that but I also need some boundaries. The past couple of months have involved a flurry of advice. I’m not great at advice. This is going to be hard. I have to describe myself in a way that has weight and intensity without sounding overly controlling or fierce because this is all stuff I need her to want to do and it is a departure from her normal wants and that’s a big sell.

I am struggling with some friend dynamics. I have put a ton of energy into out of town stuff that has since fallen through and that is causing a major crash emotionally. I have different energy for starting, middling, or ending projects. I used a lot of start energy only to have it fizzle out, which is deeply demoralising. It makes it really hard to push forward on starting energy in other parts of my life. I have so much that I need to be starting that it is creating a really terrible loop in my head. I just don’t want to. It feels pointless and stupid and demoralising and like I can’t force myself–it’s too hard. Hell, I don’t know how much is going to turn into middling energy projects and I don’t know how big the load is going to be.

It makes me feel really timid about agreeing to anything in the medium term. Even more timid about the long term. My energy level for long term projects is very close to capacity. Yet I can’t help but feel like I am missing a really big important track of thought if I don’t think about the long term because most of my long term at this point is less long term than I have truly internalised.

Pam, I just finished watching the entirety of Fresh Off the Boat; I had only watched one and two before this. It appealed to me so deeply I cannot even give it justice. I feel like I had to immigrate because that way I get to have an opportunity to live up to the standards of my parenting role model: Jessica Huang. When white parents think that I am intense/odd/overly forceful I have a whole montage of parenting. To be fair, before the last few weeks it was mostly a combination of the Hispanic and Black mothers I knew as a young child but man I want Jessica’s vanity. I do. I want to love myself with that bone deep conviction. And I am now an immigrant mom so I am allowed a lot of leeway. I win.

But, as Jessica wisely says, you retire when you die so you should master a set of skills then move on to your next big focus. I may have 13 more years of active parenting ahead of me but that’s… not the long term. That’s a lot marathon of endurance but I’ll be 55. It doesn’t give me the lead time on a next thing that finishing at 47 would have given me, but life choices have consequences. I’m really glad to have her.

Five really is my favorite age. I am coming down like a hammer on some behaviors I have problems with. I am having intense internal conflict around the fact that I need to be honest with myself that it is not the same thing as formal ABA therapy… but it’s a similar dynamic. I have some substantial needs around behavior interactions. This is where it gets really fucking tricky living in a house with a bunch of neurodiverse people. It would be really easy for us to have a negative set of interactions a lot of the time because we are all kinda jerks. Five is a magnificent opportunity to work on code switching behaviors. Five year olds think mommy is the most magical, god-like figure on the planet and they are simultaneously food avoidant, intensely individuating, and really fucking sure they are the boss of the universe.

It’s a lot of goddamn work.

In many ways it is much easier this time around because I am living with the product of my hard work. Like Jessica, I feel validated. Sure, my measure of success is very different and I have different goals for my kids but that’s ok! I’m a Californian mother moving to Scotland not a Chinese mother moving to the US; there are going to be differences.

I relish this challenge. It is time to introduce code switching. I did it earlier with the other kids and it was a more gentle on-ramp but the pandemic has changed my timetable. I now get to do in a year what I usually do in four years. Well hey, part of the point of home educating is you get to do things on your own schedule and adapt to life as it happens.

We need a baseline of “this is what it feels like to live and move in a body that is being given what it needs.” We have been in survival mode for a very long time. It’s time to slow that all the way down and teach this five year old what it needs to be like.

And now I am out of time after being interrupted three times. Sigh. I did not complete the thought.

Almost here

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My birthday is coming up. Going to Texas and England this year means I am not running away by myself. (Important note: the woman we went back to Texas to see has now passed away. I have no regrets over prioritising that goodbye trip over other more fun activities for this year.) Noah wants to be thoughtful and asked me what I want. I want to not want anything so I can’t feel let down. I want to have patience for the 973,383 times I will have to remind my children to do basic chores (like brushing teeth). I want to not miss my mother. I want to go back and rewrite my back story so that my impending birthday doesn’t feel like a hand grenade about to land on my head. A buddy suggested that I go camp somewhere for cheap, but I have been working too hard. I couldn’t right now. My hands are trashed.

I have an old friend staying with me. It is complicated in the way that integrating a new person with deep grief, and addiction issues, and learned helplessness will be. To be fair, every time I feel like I am going to freak out about an issue I have to address he is responsive and polite and most of my requests have been acknowledged and respected. But negotiating and setting boundaries is hard. It’s One More Thing on my emotional chore list and I’m tired.

It has been a fucktastically busy year. Busy on so many levels and my exhaustion is, once again, bone deep and completely saturating my soul. I feel numb and on fire and empty and aching. I deeply miss the comfort of tracking things that happen in my blog because I benefit from the space to process but mostly I do not feel I can anymore. I have reached a certain age where I now have to be realistic about the fact that I am not really going to make more very close friendships. Sure I can find new activity partners, but it isn’t the same thing. The people I have met in the last few years I am deeply conscious of this careful distance I keep. They are not allowed to know me. And I cannot talk about my deep relationships anymore because when I do I ruin them and it is absolutely all my fault.

So I do small bits of processing with people but very little in my historical record. I do almost none publicly. I mostly stuff my feelings and feel disconnected. I do not expect or hope for any kind of improvement.

I worry that the adhd medication was effective and useful for a time and it has gotten to the point where it is causing as many problems as it helps and I am starting the process of weaning off (with medical supervision do not fucking criticise me).

I watch the incoming terrifying blend of natural, political, social, and financial disasters hitting the UK with a sense of grim apprehension. I have been waiting all my life for a moment like this. I feel horrible about the fact that a lot of people are going to suffer terribly, some are going to die, but it won’t be my family. I continue my grim plod towards being able to provide a variety of supplemental food because I think famine is coming. I am installing solar panels with a battery system. I am installing rain butts, many and as large as I can manage. A chicken coop is finally being built. Hell, I’m even building a firewood pile because I worry that there will be a cold snap before the solar panels are installed. By the end of fall I will finally have my polytunnel set up for next year’s food growth.

I am working as hard and as fast as I can.

Noah’s job has managed to go most of the way towards fixing the issues that were happening with his salary. This is good. It would be a terrible time to go do a job hunt. I think we only lost a year’s worth of progress towards retirement. I am deeply aware that the fact that he is so insulated from the current global difficulties with regards to fair pay that he is still going to be able to retire before 60 means that I will never really understand the rest of my generation. Marrying him was hitting the lottery. I did not expect this. There is no fair. There is no deserve.

Even in company I feel lonely. I know I am not meeting anyone else’s emotional needs and they are not meeting mine. I do not know what could be done to change this. What I do know is that I am not suicidal and I am financially and physically prepared for more hardship than 90% of the planet. Maybe my expectation that things are going to fucking suck is almost a good thing. I am going to persevere. I will endure. I don’t need to be happy. I need to get the fucking work done.

And right now the next task on my list is to go make Middle Child a birthday cake. They are turning 12. Puberty is arriving and it’s going to be a wild fucking ride.

Goodness, monsters, and shame

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I know that other people view monsters in a solely negative light but I’ve never been good at doing that. Monsters are always creatures with a different point of view. A friend pointed out that perhaps “alien” might be an easier word to use, but I feel like alien and monster are interchangeable. A monster is a creature who is different from you who seems scary. Many monsters don’t hurt anyone at all… but they are scary anyway.

I can’t begin to count how many people have told me that I am scary.

I am amused to read that it is a common thing for autistic people to feel like they “come from a different planet” which fits more in with the word alien than the word monster. (I mention this because I have been diagnosed as autistic not because I am trying to talk about “those people”. I’m reflecting on the similar language used by folks who have the same diagnosis as me.) Only I’ve seen every Aliens movie and I can tell you with authority that those things are monsters.

Are they evil? I don’t think so. They are creatures who are trying to survive and we look like food. That’s not more evil than the bacon I had in my soup tonight.

Before you tell me I should be vegan let me tell you that many health professionals have told me that I absolutely need meat for optimal health given my constellations of issues. Veganism may work great for lots of folks… but not everyone.

Anyway.

So I’ve reached a point in the evolution of my brain where I just can’t see monsters as inherently evil. I see them as creatures with too much strength and too much ability to hurt other creatures without necessarily intending to.

Intent doesn’t matter.

I wrote yesterday that I haven’t done a major boundary violation in many years. By that I mean that I haven’t had someone say “Don’t do x to me” and then I do it. I have broken rules. I have broken agreements about what I might go do with other people. I have hurt people by accidentally doing something that would have been a boundary if we had negotiated. (I’m a clumsy bastard and I absolutely do things unintentionally sometimes.)

If intent doesn’t matter, how do I justify calling some things mistakes and other things violations?

We are all hypocritical bastards.

What I mean is that when I was young I had a few times when someone told me “Don’t do x” and I went and did x as fast as possible. I stopped doing that. It helps me sleep better at night.

But I struggle with whether I ever have the right to decide that my “softer” fuck ups are mistakes instead of monstrous violations that are evidence that I should be shunned from society for the good of people.

I look around the bdsm community and I see a lot of people who have been perceived as dangerous/bad/evil/worthy of shunning. Many of these people are monsters.

Are they worse than me? Are they better than me? What metrics are being used to judge? Why are we being judged–what’s the end goal?

The only part that matters to me in the long run is whether I find a self that is worthy to be a model for my children.

I really don’t give a shit if you like or approve of me. And yet you are my community and I love and value you so much. Many of you have contributed words of wisdom to my inside voice that I replay on a regular basis. So many of you have taught me that just because I’m a monster that doesn’t mean I have to damage people on accident. I can learn to have my damage be inflicted rarely and only with great purpose.

This community is a lot of where I learned to value the darkest and hardest parts of myself. It’s ok that I want to cut people open and lick their blood. There are folks who think that is hotter than the sun. It’s ok that I want to hit people and make them cry. There are folks who have something deep inside them made whole by such a process.

It’s not wrong to be a monster.

But can a monster be good? Do I have to be good to teach my children to do good? Do I want to teach them that they must be good?

Oh bdsm community. Do we want our teachers to be a certain level of good? What is that level? What level of goodness is demanded/expected/required of “community leaders” or educators or presenters?

We talk a lot about consent here. But how much information must be given in advance to qualify as informed consent and how much responsibility do we all bear for our fuck ups?

It’s kind of funny that in the long run of my life, the bdsm fuck ups where someone blatantly hurt me or violated my consent are not the things that weigh me down. (I say this from the hubris of having my biggest injury as a bottom be a broken bone. Broken bones heal.) I worry more about when I damaged someone else. Being a victim is not as big of a driving force to change my behavior as knowing that I have used my strength to do someone else damage.

How do we learn to be powerful and strong and monstrous and good enough?

I know I shouldn’t let the word good be taken away by assholes who want to define it as passive… but this shit is complicated.

Would it really be so bad to be a monster if one can do it without shame and without hurting people extra? Hurting people sometimes is life. But maybe just hold back on the extra?

How much hurting people is tolerable? How much is abuse?

I don’t think you have the answers either. I’m thinking that I’m still at the stage where asking the question is all I can do. The answers will come long after I need them. Like all the most important parts of life.

M/s, sexual dysfunction, and healing

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When I showed up in the bdsm scene as a fresh shiny 18 year old I was still reeling heavily from my childhood. My primary childhood rapist had been dead for less than two years. He and my brother killed themselves in a 3 month span when I was 16-17. I had been out of my abusive home of origin for less than a year.

I spent a lot of time cutting myself and I liked to burn myself and I hit my head on concrete. I engaged in extremely risky promiscuous sex. I would let almost anyone who asked politely hit me even if I didn’t think they would be safe.

I entered into my first M/s contract when I was 20. My Owner had been my boyfriend/Dominant for a while. My Owner wasn’t what I would call an emotionally supportive guy. He was not up for talking about my trauma or mental illness much. That was supposed to be kept off screen. Mostly he wasn’t even aware of my self harming because he didn’t want to be.

There were a few aspects of our relationship that were really important for my life and development. I think I have most of the executive functioning I have because he trained me. He taught me a lot about following through and executing on plans. He taught me a lot about financial solvency. He taught me about boundaries and agreements and ONLY saying you will do exactly what you will follow up and do.

I believe with all my heart and soul that my relationship with him was my first significant non-abusive relationship. Even though he spent a lot of time hitting me and objectifying me. He did it in ways we talked about very carefully and he absolutely never crossed a stated boundary. He’s a really good guy and I’m going to be grateful for the rest of my life that I got to spend the 4 out of the first 5 years of being an adult with him. I’m in a much better place now than I could have been without him.

What he couldn’t help me with in any way shape or form was my enormous dissociation problem nor my extreme sexual dysfunction. Mostly he didn’t have sex with me much… I think in part because he isn’t all that motivated by sex and in part because he damaged me internally almost every time we had sex (he had an absolutely enormous cock) and I think that was something he felt bad about but we didn’t really talk about it.

Fast forward to now. I’ve been married for 11 years. About a year ago my husband and I decided it was time for us to move forward with the M/s part of our relationship. When my husband asked me to marry him he asked me to be his wife and to be his slave. I told him I could be his wife but neither of us were ready for M/s together and we needed to figure out a bunch of shit together before we did that.

So we waited 10 years. I like to pretend this was us being responsible and trying to get to know one another. In reality it’s more complicated than that.

My husband doesn’t have a lot in common with my former Owner. He’s intensely interested in helping me emotionally process. He has training as a hypnotherapist and I would say that in the past 11 years we have spent hundreds of hours talking about my various psych problems and my history. He’s the only person who has ever been all that interested in me or in why I am so fucked up. He makes me feel seen and valid and important in a way I haven’t ever felt in my whole life. My husband is awesome.

But sex has continued to be complicated. I’m still very damaged internally. My cunt was shredded over and over throughout my life starting when I was a baby. My cunt isn’t in great shape. Two vaginal births have… strangely helped and hurt at the same time. A lot of scar tissue was broken up in the process of delivery. But I almost died because my cunt was not real able to function the way it was supposed to and I hemorrhaged very badly.

For a lot of our marriage we have both tried very hard to make one another happy. We are in what psychologists like to call a “repair marriage” where we both showed up intensely fucked up and we are trying to consciously help one another become healthier, more whole people. Mostly this is going pretty well. Except when it blows up like a fucking wild fire because we are both damaged people and that shit happens.

For many years I have operated under the assumption that my husband married me in large part because I spent my childhood with my parents actively telling me that marriage meant you were a permanent whore and you never got to say no to sex again.

I have a hard time believing anyone would want me for anything else.

But my cunt is uhhhhh damaged. Severely. That damage is a constant problem and it always has been. Sex that is barely too rough can cause significant re-tearing and sometimes bleeding. And I don’t mean rough sex. I mean if I am .00001 ounces too low in moisture for lubrication.

I’ve spent the vast majority of my life with my cunt burning like fire every minute of the day and night. Because I chase sex like my life depends on it. Because what else am I good for?

Last year I hit a wall with my husband where I couldn’t continue to do what I had been doing with him to manage. I don’t do most of the forms of self harm I used to engage in. I don’t cut myself, I don’t burn myself, I stopped beating my head… the only drug I use is pot and that’s with many doctors telling me that I MUST KEEP USING IT. It’s the most effective medication for my complicated array of mental and physical issues. I need medication. It’s not optional.

So I have worked hard on getting rid of most of my dysfunctional coping methods. That’s good! But what do I do now when I feel completely flooded and unable to cope? Well last year I tried to lean more heavily on my excellent dissociation ability and I asked a bunch of my nice friends to hit me and fuck me a bunch. They did. It was fun and I thank y’all for that.

My husband flipped out. That was… not a way he was ok with me coping and we’ve had a rough year since then processing all the damage I did to our relationship. Damage I did in part because I was trying to figure out how to twist myself into pretzels so I could meet needs of his that were hurting me really badly.

Now we’ve had over a year in a row of a lot of screaming matches. It’s been hella festive and hard. Why did we pick this fucking year to be like, “Fine. It’s M/s now or never?”

Because making optimal choices is not my strong suit.

Frankly having the first rule in our M/s contract be that I have to prevent him from damaging me is… quite the head fuck.

It means I am having to talk very explicitly about the extend of the damage I have sustained over 34ish years of harming my cunt. It means that I have to get very loud and aggressive about I CANNOT JUST BE AVAILABLE FOR SEX WHENEVER YOU WANT IT. THAT IS NOT OK.

Because I can’t. I am not physically not emotionally capable of doing that in a way that is even remotely healthy for me.

I have been struggling to carry the amount of pain I feel for my whole life. I have wanted to die for more than 30 years. I try year by year to reduce how much pain I’m in so it is less of a burden, so I can carry it longer. But it’s very hard.

Before some fucking asshole tells me to see a therapist… I’ve been in therapy for 33+ years. I’ve seen more than 35 counselors/psychologists/psychiatrists. I currently have a large and complex medical team who all talk to one another about my shit. My kids are in therapy. We go in and out of marriage counseling. My husband has seen therapists. We see a family therapist. Keep your obvious unhelpful advice to yourself, m’kay?

Suicidality is a coping method. It’s not an ideal one. It sucks. It hurts me and it hurts everyone around me. But I’m coping as absolutely best as I can. My medical team tells me constantly that the amount of progress I have made and continue to make is just about miraculous. People like me usually just die. I’m doing really well for where I started. Even if I do still feel like a festering pile of shit.

My husband wants to keep me for as long as he can. That means helping me figure out how to be ok with being inside this brain and inside this body because that’s the path my life just has to take.

That means we have to figure out how to have sex without hurting me. As a submissive masochist that’s a very hard thing for me to demand. It feels like a very wrong thing to ask for. It feels like I am bad and selfish and cheating him out of what he deserves for putting up with my stupid self.

But I have to change this. No matter how hard it is. Because this right here is a serious problem.

Some day I have to decide that the health of my cunt matters or all the work I’m doing to try and convince my body that I am safe and I should stop the hypervigilance and constant paranoia about who is going to hurt me next is wasted time and energy.

I don’t have so much time and energy that I can afford to waste it at this point. I’m so tired.

Not to mention how fucking expensive this god damn medical care is. I feel like such a waste of resources.

I like to be hit. But there are a lot of limits around what I can bear and still function.

I like sex. But there are a lot of limits around what I can bear and still be functional.

It is very hard to believe I am worth this much consideration and effort.

But he keeps telling me he wants to keep me.

Pieces of dysfunction.

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Mostly I keep my crazy ranting on my blog. I figure the few people who want to know my wackiness follow me over there and writing on a more public site is… I don’t know… forcing my insanity down peoples throats. But the thing is, the stuff I have to work on changing next is stuff that is rooted in my sexuality. That’s a journey that has been highly shaped by folks who hang out here. So once in a while my insanity will leak out a bit here.

I’ve worked pretty hard on changing my perception of myself over the years. I no longer believe I am worthless. I have substituted the belief that I am an incredibly effective tool. I know how to do a lot of different kinds of work and when I show up to do work… I get a lot done. I have developed quite a bit of pride in how effectively I can get work done over a broad swath of types of work. I’m not a one trick pony.

My family wanted me to perceive myself as stupid but all of the GATE testing when I was a kid and grown ups going “Holy crap this kid is SMART” means that their attempts to make me think I was stupid just kind of failed. I’m brilliant and I’m comfortable with acknowledging that. The rate at which I read complicated non-fiction books helps me not ever succumb to the belief that I might be stupid. But I have to keep working consciously on expanding what I know or I would start chanting this at myself. I view smart as something that has to be constantly worked on or it doesn’t count.

I could go through a long list of specifically triggering things I’ve worked on, but the problem that keeps coming up and I just can’t fucking deal with it in a rational way… is what I was born to be.

Let me explain. My father raped my mother when she knew she was fertile and she didn’t want to have more kids. He wanted to make another kid to rape. He was already raping the children they had. Like a true pedophile, gender wasn’t that important to my father.

So from when I was a tiny baby the story I was told about my existence is that I was made so that men would have more holes to use and how I felt about that really didn’t matter.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. This is the core belief I have not been able to shake or move or change in years of trying. This is what I am here for. It doesn’t really matter if it feels good to me or if I like it or if I want it. That’s why I am here. It is literally why I was made.

I don’t know how to alter these wires in my brain so that I stop giving a shit what my father’s intentions were and start feeling like I get to define what I am here for.

This piece is just sticky as hell and I have not figured out how to change it. This is what brings me to my knees over and over sobbing and feeling like I need to die to get away from the terrible burden of being responsible for taking more and more and more pain inside my body.

Even when my partners (my husband most of all) have tried to figure out how to fuck me without hurting me we always run up against this strong limitation that I can’t really talk in the moment about sex hurting my cunt. I dissociate away from that so fast I am literally physically incapable of talking when it happens. Even though I’ve done decades of work on trying to fix this.

I’ve fixed a lot of pieces of this. But this spot still persists and I have not yet figured out how to rewire this in my brain.

I can write about it when it’s not happening. I can barely speak out loud about this topic without melting down into tears or screaming swear words like FUCK YOU FOR HURTING ME. Which is not all that productive.

I continue to be impressed with my husband’s persistence in wanting to help me deal with my laundry list of problems.

I sabotage efforts to make sex not hurt me. Because I have this internal motivation that I have to be providing a lot of sex, even if it is damaging me and I have to initiate even when I’m in pain and….

I know I create a lot of this problem with my utter unwillingness to act like pain in my cunt is worthy of acknowledgment in the moment. There were a few times when I was very young when I mentioned that it hurt to partners and the response was a solid wall of “So?” and I just completely lost the ability.

The kinds of 25 year olds who like to fuck 12 year olds really don’t care.

This internal belief, that fucking is literally why I exist, is why I push so hard for sex with so many people. I have an internal programming that dictates that I must ask for sex. Because this is why I exist. To give this experience to people who want it.

This has gotten more complicated as my partner has gone through a shift from actively wanting polyamory when we met to very actively wanting mainly monogamy with very rare occasions of group sex.

Fitting into the expectations that are currently held for me takes a lot of work. I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s not always easy. But the good I get from being part of this family is so breathtaking. I get to belong somewhere. People care when I’m crying. People care about me in this house. I am important to them. It’s worth a lot of pain and suffering to try and deal with more layers of my mental illness to try and stay here for more of this.

Recently I went through a multiple month period where I genuinely didn’t want to die. That is the longest I can remember feeling like that in my entire life. I have always wanted to die. That has been the drumbeat chasing me through life for just about 30 years now. “I should die because this hurts too fucking much.” I want more of the not-wanting-to-die feeling. And I have to change this belief to get there.

This is tricky because I partially married my husband because he has the highest sex drive of anyone I ever seriously dated. He’s been the only one who wanted to keep up with what I wanted to initiate.

But a lot of what I initiate hurts me. And then there are waves of consequences.

This is so unfair.

It is desperately unfair to my husband and frankly it isn’t fucking fair to me either. It is fucking shitty being in my head and in my body. It isn’t anyone’s fault at this point that it sucks so much to be inside of me… but it’s a fact.

One of my buddies idly mused that I get a lot of self esteem from my interactions with my children.

Children are the only people I know how to interact with without feeling like I am failing in not offering sex. That’s the only time I feel like it is completely appropriate for me to not be offering sex. It’s safe in a way nothing and no adult ever is.

I don’t ask everyone for sex all the time for a variety of reasons (I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be asked, I’m pretty sure my husband would flip out, etc) but I have had to grow up and work on my boundaries to get to this point. It took a fair bit of maturing before I understood that my father was lying and not everyone wanted that from me.

Thanks to all the folks who have skillfully and tactfully turned me down over the years. I’m glad you didn’t follow that up with refusing to know me because I was so rude/tactless/gross/insert word of choice.

I’ve tried to grow up as fast as I have been able. I’m a lot closer to my goal of “grown upness” than I actually believed I would make it to… but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping I manage around the time my 9 year old makes it to adulthood.

What am I here for?

That’s this huge existential question, right? I’m super partial to the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who went through the Holocaust. He wrote the book Man’s Search For Meaning. His general hypothesis is that folks can survive any horror in life if they have something they believe in and it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be “I want to see my wife/husband again”. That kind of belief is enough. If you believe that your love for someone else is your reason for continuing to be alive then you can make it enough to see you through anything.

I can’t control why I was made. I can’t control the intentions behind my makers.

But why do I stay alive?

Maybe that needs to be the focus of the next stage of work. I can’t change what I was made for or whether I did my best to live up to that for the first few decades of my life.

But why now?

I feel really guilty that a lot of why I’m staying alive at this point is a science experiment. Will I be a good enough mother that my children will want to know me when they are adults? Am I capable of treating them in a way that will cause them to want to know me?

I feel guilty about this because I feel like I “should” pick something that is more oriented towards my husband and… that’s different. It’s really complicated that I already feel like I have failed at being a good wife and I feel like there is no walking back from that. He’s not leaving because I’m better than nothing but I will never make it to good. I can’t hang my hat on that in this life.

Ok, so “I am bad” and “I am a monster” are strongly tied in with what is causing me these eternal problems.

It is hard because my husband is having a hard time with how much the shift into being a mother has derailed a lot of the hypersexuality and a lot of my strong need to be hit so much. I’m boring now.

I feel like I am bad for even trying to work towards a future where my cunt will hurt less because that will mean I am not meeting his expectations for how often he wants to get laid.

And the cycle continues.

Evolving sexual dysfunction

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I’ve been documenting the intense pain I feel in my cunt for over a decade and a half. It’s not… news. It’s a fact of my life. I’m 36 and I wasn’t aware for the first several decades of my life that it was weird that I thought cunts were supposed to burn and be in terrible pain most of the time. Oh. What do you mean your body doesn’t feel like it hates you all of the time?

I’ve had a lot of sex even though it hurts. Sometimes the fact that it hurts is part of the reason I seek out the sex, it’s a form of self-harm that people don’t question in the same way that they question me when I open myself up with a scalpel. Oh, you’re hypersexual? That’s fun! Sorta.

But I’ve hit this point in the evolution of my mental illness and suicidality where I need to reduce how much ambient pain I feel in my body. I can’t cope the same way I used to. And there are these people who would be devastated for the rest of their lives if I killed myself so I need to find some kind of way to be in less pain.

I see all the doctors and health practitioners to manage my fibromyalgia and other physical problems that can be managed.

How do I get my cunt to stop hurting? That’s… that’s going to be a big deal.

I’m not in the kind of marriage where declaring my cunt off limits semi-permanently would work out. I’m also not allowed to manage the pain in my cunt by doing the hyper-sexual thing so that my cunt becomes numb and it’s easier to dissociate. The more sex I have with lots of people the less I am capable of noticing the pain in my cunt. It’s not that it is gone… it is that my brain puts it in a compartment and I’m not allowed to look at it in the same way. It’s not a great long-term coping strategy because I cause physical damage as I use it.

Most of my life has been me flip flopping back and forth between various forms of self-harm trying to do slightly less damage with each change. I’m still not sure how to fix this problem without switching to something else that will cause a different kind of damage.

The intensity of my current suicidal jag combined with where I otherwise am in life stage events mean I have to make some progress on this issue that has haunted me since I was a toddler.

I have to make progress on this idea of my body being worthless and only existing for other people to hurt for their pleasure. Yeah yeah masochism/submission/whatever. I need some god damn limits. Only it’s hard to defend a self you don’t believe in. It’s hard to act like you have self worth when you are acting on issues where you have not been allowed to have the word no be effective.

It’s not that I can’t defend myself against anything. It’s that I have gaps in my sense of self where I can’t defend those gaps. Mostly I’m a wildly confrontational person. But not when it comes to defending my cunt.

I gave up that battle as hopeless decades ago. My opinion about what happened to my cunt mattered so little for so long.

But that has to change and it has to change inside of me before I can change how I let people treat me. I don’t know how to think of myself as someone worth defending, not like that.

This is really hard.

Reinventing yourself

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People who have known me since I was a kid tell me that I don’t seem like the same person any more; I have changed so much. I changed a lot in my time in the scene, then being a teacher was a huge shift, being a parent has kind of forced me to complete a lot of huge seismic level differences in my life.

For the first few years I had kids I went through a Madonna/whore problem where my body stopped wanting sex or bdsm. It was the way that my brain managed to pick a path through my personal history of having no healthy boundaries around sex. It wasn’t a healthy response because it was bad for my marriage.

But I grew up watching all of the adults in my family have sex. I needed to have some kind of shift in my brain that ensured that my children would not see me have sex. My kids have still never walked in on me having sex and I’ve been doing this gig almost a decade. It is a huge accomplishment for someone with my background.

I think that my libido partially shut off because that was a lot of what I saw happen to my mom’s life. She had a few boyfriends (all of whom I saw her have sex with) and she realized that I was acting out a WHOLE LOT and she… shut it down and to the best of my knowledge has never had sex again. I think she stopped when I was around 10. That was a quarter of a century ago. I’m pretty sure my mom has been celibate because she decided she didn’t know how to have a healthy sex life.

She might be right. She picked some awful people.

I feel this kind of long drawn out pleasure and shock that the vast majority of people I slept with are really awesome people and they are still all invited to my house if I have a Christmas party. Only a few people have fallen off the list because mostly… gosh I picked good people.

I read in a book about postpartum recovery that it takes a body 4 years to fully reset after having a baby. My libido came back like a sledge hammer about 5 years after having kids. 4-5 years is a natural child spacing in nomadic societies so it isn’t that shocking that my body picked that window for saying, “Moar seks please.”

It’s been complicated since then. My poor husband has adjusted from the extreme hypersexuality I experienced when we first got married and before our marriage to me shutting down completely to me being a bitch and fucking lots of people as my libido exploded and… now I’m pregnant again.

What is going to happen next?

I don’t know but healthier sex has to be part of this experience.

It is complicated for a masochist to stop something because it hurts. But there are kinds of pain that are positive/emotionally expressive for me and there are kinds of pain where I shut down my brain and go to a bad place. There are kinds of pain that increase my general feeling that I should die because I have no other escape from pain in this lifetime.

My kids and my husband tell me all the time that they want me to live for A VERY LONG TIME and I’ve tried to change how I live to reflect the fact that they don’t want me to die young.

I have to figure out how to convince my body that I can be in less pain. (Fibromyalgia makes this super complicated.) I have to figure out how to stop shutting down my self-protection mechanisms during sex. Because the specific pain I have during vaginal sex sometimes (it’s not all the time) is a problem. It is directly tied into the abuse from my father. It is a mainline to my internal reaction that I was born from rape; I was born to be raped; that is all I should deserve to expect until I die.

I have changed so much about my destiny. I didn’t think I would ever have a forever home. I didn’t think I would ever be part of a family.

I have a really cool family. I mean, we are all flaming weirdos… but we like each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and it is all so intensely positive…

I didn’t think someone like me would ever get this far, let me tell you. But I did it.

My current shrink is probably the most bdsm aware/positive shrink I’ve ever seen. They suggested that I’m going to have to face my dissociation head on and in their opinion I am going to have to do it within the structure of my M/s relationship.

Now that’s some awesome feedback to get from a shrink. I’ve never had a shrink talk so specifically about the difference between therapy and therapeutic and bdsm can be so very therapeutic…

I know. I used to not be able to set any boundaries at all with my body. Bdsm taught me how. My beautiful friends and play partners taught me how. Very therapeutic.

It is complicated on so many because having my husband hit me a lot is different from having my lovely friends hit me a lot. My husband is the only person on this god-forsaken planet who has given me any real safety. It’s complicated when he hits me. It isn’t that I never like it. It’s that there are so many layers of psychological events that happen around the physical events that… it’s hard to manage that and bounce back into my life.

My life is very constrained. I have to “behave” and project a kind of behavior that is very hard for me. I believe that children learn primarily through modeling and if I want to show my kids making good choices I have to make good choices and I’m really more inclined towards being a fuck up and doing everything wrong.

But the children. Sigh.

My kids are the reason I get up in the morning. My kids are the reason I put breathtaking amounts of effort into being a healthier person. My kids are the reason I’m trying to learn how to stop hurting myself so that I can handle being alive long enough to watch them grow up.

I haven’t cut myself in over half a decade. I have burned myself in longer than that. I haven’t beat my head on concrete in a bit longer than that. I have made a lot of progress on my self mutilation.

I really want to know what happens to my kids. I think they are so neat. I feel so lucky that I get to have another child. These people are the best people in my life. I wake up and go to sleep seeing their smiling faces.

I did not believe that my children would like me. I expected to be the recipient of contempt and apathy. Instead my children adore me like I adore them. It feels like magic.

Is it magical enough to propel me through figuring out how to stop allowing more pain into my body that damages me?

What does being kinky mean anyway?

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I feel like I’m in such a weird place in my body and in my mind. Yes, pregnancy is weird… but this predated the pregnancy. This got started over a year ago.

I still like the idea of being tied up and hit. When it happened last year I still liked the reality of it. But this is compounded by the fact that I don’t have a lot of childcare and when I did… it was not really during hours that were conducive to kinky play. I know that most of my friends have had a “Whoops the kids walked in during sex” story but I don’t. My sex life is off. fucking. screen. My children do not walk in on us having sex. And I don’t think they ever will. I have sturdy locks all the fuck over my house to prevent such a mishap.

Because given my background having my children SEE me have sex is a major violation and one I won’t be able to shake off.

If I could forget the sight of my mother and my sister fucking people maybe it would be different. My children will not learn from me.

Things with Noah are complicated for a lot of reasons. I have a strong sense of debt. Noah didn’t rescue me from the streets, I did that for myself thank you very much, but he did rescue me from being alone and that’s a big damn deal. Noah gave me a forever home that he’s serious about. If we divorced he would probably want me to have the house and he would leave. I’m a stubborn piece of shit and I wouldn’t accept but that’s different. Noah gave me a family. He didn’t share his family I’m still basically a non-person there (except with his grandmother and his aunties–I am glad for those women) but he gave me children. He helped me create a family where we both get to belong.

I owe Noah a lot. Noah has cared for me through several periods of time when I was all but nonfunctional. He feeds me. He makes sure I take my meds. He asks after my appointments and reminds me to go. When I express my overwhelming shame at stealing so many resources for my health he tells me over and over that keeping me alive and healthy is the point of us having money.

And the primary thing Noah wants from me as a demonstration of love is physical contact. Specifically, sex. The talking is awesome. The snuggling is great. He really gets a lot out of the sex.

My body is complicated though. I arrived at this marriage with sexual dysfunction in place. I arrived in his life with scar tissue and pain through my nether region. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t cause any of the damage. But it’s there and I have to cope with it.

In my brain I want to be available for sex at any moment because that would be hot and fun for him and it would make him feel really loved. I tried to meet that standard for years. I hurt myself in the process and I damaged the trust in my marriage.

It isn’t Noah’s fault that I did that. He was negotiating in good faith. I was doing the best I could and I fucked up.

The thing is… I’ve been hurting myself for almost 30 years. This was just the latest incarnation and in some fucked up ways it was a healthier way of hurting myself than most I have tried. I still need to change it. But I also need to acknowledge that I am not as pathetic and back sliding as I feel.

This is complicated.

I feel like I don’t count as a kinky person anymore because in my mind kink is associated with exhibitionism and public play. The fact that I call my husband Daddy when he’s fucking me is just kind of meh, whatever. Basically vanilla people do that too.

cough

I may have some weird assumptions here and there.

It doesn’t help that when I got into the scene there was a lot of nasty back and forth in email lists about how having a strong focus on sex instead of just the SM part of bdsm meant you weren’t really kinky. And I like fucking lots of people so I’m more of a swinger, right? Only at swinger parties I have to ask humbly for exceptions to the rules because I really want to make this person cry while I’m sucking his dick.

Ok I didn’t actually make him cry. He’s really tough. But he made lovely noises.

I don’t feel like I fit in a community. I’m too sexual to feel properly “kinky” and I’m too kinky for most of the sex-only spaces.

And it doesn’t help that my behavior in private is way more timid and unwilling to set boundaries than I am in public. In public I am responding to the crowd and crowds take rock solid boundaries. I have to protect myself. At home…. I don’t want to. I don’t want to say no. I don’t want to set limits.

Which is incredibly fucking stupid and creates problems all over the place. I know.

Playing at home is complicated because the kids are always god damn here and I don’t want them hearing or seeing anything. Ever. Period.

It isn’t that I will never be “out” with my children. It’s that my sex life will always be off stage and kind of a mystery. I’ll hint. I’ll answer some questions in broad ways. That’s it. I will never discuss my kinks with my children. They know I have not been monogamous all my life. They know I went out with a lot of people before I got married (How are you supposed to know if someone is right for you without trying out lots and lots and lots of wrong people first?!) and they know I’ve been on dates since getting married.

I think that’s plenty.

I’m ok with talking to my kids about sex in the abstract or in ways that will increase their future safety… they don’t need to learn how to have sex from me. My way is kinda fucked up. Like at one point my daughter asked if there is one kind of sex (or something very like that question) and I said, “Oh no! There are lots of kinds of sex. There’s manual sex (with fingers/hands); there’s oral sex (that involves a mouth and a set of genitals); there’s anal sex (playing with a butt–can be with fingers or a penis); and vaginal sex (can be with a penis or with toys).”

My daughter’s response was to raise her eyebrows and kind of say “hunh.” We didn’t keep talking after that. It wasn’t a conversation that needed a lot of in depth follow up at that point.

I just will never have a child who is talked into anal sex because it “doesn’t count”. What bullshit. Also: a huge swath of teenage girls these days are being pressured into oral sex because it “doesn’t count” and it’s a way to keep from having “more happen” and oh hell no.

My children will have language about sex and about their body. They will know what they are saying yes to and what they are saying no to. And I’m pretty damn sure my kids are growing up with the idea that sex is a super fun thing to do when you are ready and with the right person(s) but until you are ready it’s a problem.

And that all feels weirdly tied up in my kinky. Because I still struggle to set the boundaries I want them to have. I still struggle to say out loud “I want _____.” I can ask for abasing things very easily. Not affirming things.

I still struggle with the idea that sex is supposed to feel good for me. When the first several decades of your sex life is incredibly painful… that’s a hard thing to rewire in your body. It is hard to change my expectation.

What does being kinky mean?

I think it is funny that my current M/s contract has been going on for 9 months and I still don’t think I’m that kinky. Even though I have rules around my body and my sexuality that I follow.

WHAT IS BEING KINKY?

Touching without asking x-post

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Hey y’all, I want to talk about a subject that is near and dear to my heart. Touching.

I had one of those shitty childhoods. (I even wrote a fucking book about it. Thousands of people have read it and concur: yup a shitty childhood.)

Being touched is complicated for me. I like touch. I need touch a great deal more than average because I was pretty severely neglected as a young child. I was not touched appropriately and it has damaged me. What touch I got was often sexual abuse. Which complicates all kinds of touching in a sexualized setting.

I came into the bdsm community at 18 years old. I found the local munches, local private parties, public scene, and I found myself an experienced top pronto.

When other people talk about their college life experiences I cock my head to one side and listen because I wonder what it would be like to be normal. I do have a college degree, but I lived with my Dominant/Daddy/Owner. For two years of college I was a 24/7 slave.

I just don’t identify with the “college” experience people talk about. When I graduated I knew the names of three of my classmates.

I personally knew the folks who taught bdsm from coast to coast. I’d slept in many of their houses and played with them.

Now that I’m at the ripe old age of 34, almost 35 and I’ve been in the bdsm community for almost 16 of those years…

Touching is weird for me. I have expectations about boundaries. My expectations are different when I’m out in the normal world. Yes, I know that little old ladies in the grocery store touch me without my consent all the fucking time and I can’t explode with anger and tell them it ISN’T FUCKING OK TO TOUCH ME.

I know.

But I found a safe place. I found a place where the rule is don’t touch anyone or anything without explicitly asking for consent. It’s posted all over the damn place. If you didn’t learn that rule in kindergarden (you fucking should have) we will supplement your education until you get it.

Don’t. Touch. People. Without. Asking.

I know you don’t mean anything. I know you think it is no big deal to violate consent this way. But in my PTSD ridden body that went through decades of torture…

Actually it is a big deal. I am only able to relax and enjoy this environment because this rule exists. Because I am allowed to be vulnerable and I will have protection around the soft squishy parts of my heart.

I don’t mean that nothing bad will ever happen. I don’t mean that I really think I’ll never get touched without consent. It means that it is safe me to turn around and snarl IT ISN’T FUCKING OK TO TOUCH ME and I’m not bad. This is the one place in the world where it is safe for me to defend myself like that and not get “What a crazy bitch”.

So if it hurts your feelings that this rule exists in the bdsm community, yeah. Maybe it isn’t for you. Because this rule exists for the safety of a lot of people. The right to touch without asking is not something that makes anyone safer. It makes you happier. I don’t care so much about that.

Despite the harshness of this I love you. Even if I don’t know you very well. I think you have a lot to offer.

But don’t. Fucking. Touch. Me.

Boundaries are important for relationships. Because only in the conversation about where those boundaries exist do you get to define the me and the you in the relationship so that you can have real substantial interactions instead of just projections.

I want to know you and I want you to know me. Part of knowing me is knowing that touch is a complicated beast and there are days I’m in agonizing pain and I don’t want a hug. It’s not personal. It’s fibromyalgia.

But you don’t know unless you ask, do you?

Apparently I don’t want to track.

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I got busy. Then we decided to use a lot less electricity for a while (no artificial lights and no computers during darkness) and my computer time went down. I'm cheating today because I am in a bad mood. 

I went and saw my therapist on Thursday and that was a good thing because I was having a lot of intrusive suicidal ideation all week before that. Over the weekend I just didn't have the thoughts and that was restful. But this morning Calli had a hard time sleeping and I wasn't very patient with her and I feel quite guilty about it and here I am. Noah tapped me out because I wasn't being very patient. Shanna didn't have this many sleep interruptions. This is hard. I don't handle many of them–Noah does 90% of them. Once in a while I try to tap him out around four so that he can get a little sleep before work. I did that last night and I shouldn't have. Turns out she had just barely woken up and he had slept most of the night. Dang it. That's what I get for trying to be nice. He came back at five and told me I could be done. He's very nice. It's going to be a long day and I will be nicer to the kids all day if I have some time when I am not being kicked or having someone scream in my ear. 

Running continues. I have missed a couple of days of training due to tripping. I feel mixed about that. It just means I need to be more careful, right? I don't think that long term it will be a problem that I lost a total of three and a half miles more than five months before the marathon. I will still get enough miles logged. It will be fine. I'm struggling with my attitude about running. Some where in tracking I stopped thinking about it as "just get there" and started thinking "I am a loser for being this slow." I am not a loser. I am not an athlete. I do not have a history of running. I'm doing fucking great. My attitude isn't great and I'm trying to work on it. I wish I could just feel happy with myself for what I have done so far. I don't know why I feel so little pride in the half marathon. I suppose because I was bitching and moaning in my head the whole time. I cried through a lot of the race and felt self-pitying. Why should I feel pride in spending three hours feeling that way? Running is extremely emotional for me. I think about my siblings a lot. I think about my brothers and how they used to run. I think about being told all my life that I was not athletic and never being given space to try. If I wasn't going to go out and be the fastest person on a track team tomorrow I shouldn't bother to get off the couch. 

I think about how I want my kids to perceive exercise. And I think it sucks that my experience of running is that it triggers a lot of crying and very sad thinking. I wish to God that I had memories of my family that made me happy. I want to be able to think of something that has happened to me and not cry or feel bitter. How do I turn things like a half marathon into something to feel kind of lame about? I know I didn't "enjoy" running it. So it doesn't count. I sure as heck wasn't that fast. I feel like there is no point in me doing things. I think that at least part of me believes that because no one will be there at the finish line whether I am the first person or the last who gives a shit about me so why bother? It doesn't matter what I go do when I am alone in a room by myself. I don't really exist.

I go see a therapist because I need to have an "authority" who I can come back to time and time again who I can come back to and get continual reassurance that I am doing the right thing. I need to be seen. I need to have someone I can trust witnessing my life who isn't going to allow me to be invisible. I have had a few good therapists in my life. They have all been able to present a neutral facade no matter what I am telling them about until I ask them for feedback. Then they react a great deal. I can't handle working with a therapist who flinches and pulls away from me when I talk about the things that are going on in my head. I can't expect neutrality from Noah or my friends. I have gotten to the point in my therapy career where I talk about that on the first visit with a new person. "I need a blank wall. I will project all of my shit onto you if you give me any reaction." My current therapist has a wonderful presence. She radiates comforting. I like her.

Last week we talked a lot about what it means that having panic attacks and feeling suicidal is my normal. What do I do about that? How do I go about living my life knowing that it is true? I have yet to have a stage of life where I have gone more than a year without thinking about suicide. I didn't think about it for the first year of Shanna's life. Then I had a miscarriage and a bunch of issues with my mother. 

If I wasn't someone with a panic disorder what would my life look like? How would I interact with people? What would would I do with my time? I have to construct this story out of whole cloth. I try to guess. I switch social groups so often because I don't feel like I guess well and then I am afraid to see people again. I won't be able to duplicate the same "character" I was trying for the last time I saw them. A lot of how this is manifesting is I just don't talk as much any more. I feel like I only have bad things to say so I shouldn't say anything at all. Sometimes I get into a blurty stage because I have so many words in my head and I don't have very many appropriate places to put them. 

I want my kids to have a different relationship with exercise than I have. So I pretend that running is awesome and I do a lot of it. I like that my kid thinks nothing of the mile walk to the park. She would much rather walk to the park than drive because she thinks car seats are annoying. We have a different sense of time than most people. We have long days to fill. We don't do much and we don't have very many obligations at specific times. Well, we do a lot. It's just all decided at the last minute and most of it is in or near our house.

How would I live if I didn't have panic attacks and suicidal ideation? I'm not really sure what would be different. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn't waste so much physical energy on being afraid. Terror is hard on the body. My body feels terror a great deal of the time while I am doing common every day things. I wish I understood how much it was taking away from me, although I'm not sure I need more reasons to be resentful. I don't like my body for being maladapted in this way. I wish my body understood that it is ok to be safe here. I kind of feel like part of it was being mailed the letter. People who are mad at me aren't even going to limit telling me that I'm bad to the internet. They are going to mail shit to my house so that I can't avoid knowing that I'm bad even if I avoid the internet. Well, fuck. 

I want the voices inside my head to be kind to me. I want to know how to change those tapes. I'm tired of feeling like I loathe myself. I'm tired of feeling critical of my accomplishments. I really and truly am safe. I feel like I need to get to the place where I can really trust that Noah and Shanna and Calli are probably always going to like me. They will get mad at me as well. Other people need to be not my problem. I need to stop caring if other people think I am bad. I need to stop rehearsing these tapes that confirm that people think I am bad. I need to not care that what I am doing is not good enough for other people. That isn't my job. I don't need to be good enough for them. Three people. What would my body feel like if I really understood that I only need to expend energy worrying about three people instead of untold numbers? I think I should make up that story in my head. That should probably be my story all the time. Then I won't have to worry about remembering a new one. This is my family. I care for them and they care for me.

Instead of hearing my brother criticize me I need to hear Shanna telling me that I'm the best mom in the world. Shanna has already declared that she is running in a race with me as soon as she is big enough. I guess I will have to keep running. I need to get the wheels fixed on her bike so she can ride while I run. 

I had to have kids or I probably wouldn't have made it to thirty. I have been suicidal for a very long time. My will power needs rejuvenation. Right now my job is to teach my kids how to be functional, happy adults. That means I have to figure out how such a person behaves and act like that in front of them all the time. So I cry when I run. Maybe I should stop feeling bad about that. Maybe it's really awesome that I have space in my life where I am alone and I get to vent those horrible overwhelming emotions. Maybe a skinned knee isn't the worst thing in the world. I do need to pay more attention when I am running. I want to show Shanna how to be competent and that means being at least minimally attentive. Injuries suck, yo. 

I’m going to talk about triggers.

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I've spent the past few weeks reminding myself that my early life was a festering shithole of despair the likes of which very few people survive. I'm running low on empathy for other people. So that seems like the perfect time for me to talk about my expectations of how other people will manage their shit. We all have it. That's fine. If you feel upset by things you are reading on the internet, close the window. If you feel upset by things you are hearing said in person you have two choices, you can try to tactfully change the subject; this is done by hearing a conversation segue and going full steam ahead towards that Shiny Change Of Topic!. Heck, you can even announce, "Look! It's A Shiny Change Of Topic!" as you do it. That's ok. That's a way of trying to be comfortable in conversation.

Or you can get off your ass and walk away. At no point it is it ok for you to start ranting about how people have triggered you and they are all bad bad bad bad people for daring to say something that Hurt Your Feelings.

Wow. Do you think you are the only important person in the world? Do you really believe that in order to be in your life people have to spent 100% of their time doing only activities you approve of? You have issues. Big issues. The kind that can be manipulated by fucked up professionals with lots of training on how to manipulate peoples emotions.

I have a lot of triggers. I could not begin to enumerate them all. They change over time. When I am in a period where I am heavily triggered, I stop participating in the world. I go home. I stop reading other peoples blogs. I stop participating in forums. I still post, because I do so compulsively and I could not stop if I wanted to. But I'm not reading. I don't have the emotional energy to risk looking at other peoples lives. I might get upset. If I get upset I will have days of back lash. I will feel this constant internal struggle between rage and despair because dear god why do people always do this to me?  The truth is, they don't always do that to me.  It happens sometimes.  But when your brain is in whatever chemical state it is in right now sometimes… that's the only state you can remember being in.  That's not a rational feeling.  That's not a true statement.  You have other moods and other ways you feel. Maybe not recently.  But life is long.

Deciding that who and what you are right now is so important to preserve that everyone around must change in substantial ways to make you more comfortable uhm, well… that's fucked up.  I'll be flat with you.  That's disordered thinking.  That's having omniscience problem.  Get over yourself.

People need to go live their lives and have the experiences they have, for good and bad.  The more you try to step in between other people having their lives the farther you are away from having an actual relationship.  People are not puppets.  The kind of person who will only do what you say is generally kind of icki and I don't want to be near them.  People who want to "call the shots" on how I talk about my life makes my skin crawl.  That's my fucking trigger.  And guess what, I'm a grown up.  I go back to my fucking sandbox and I deal with my emotions.  In an appropriate way.  In a limited way.  I'm going to rant through this post and then I am going to roll my eyes and go back to my life.  Because I don't need to deal with other people being passive aggressive and control freaks.  I have better things to do with my life.  

I modify my behavior willingly for the people I live with.  They have a right to ask me for concessions.  At the same time, I push for time to write because I need it for my mental health.  I have to push back there.  I have to push back about that universally, across the board.  I need to not only say that was an epic party, but holy shit I got to play with two hot girls.  One I made smile and one I made cry.  I felt honored by both.  They both teach me different things about life.  And I need to honor the lessons I am learned.  That is something that I need for me.  I need to figure out how to navigate my triggers in life.  Because I have a lot of them.  I'm trying to figure out what that means.  What can my life look like.

I'll tell you that declaring subjects or locations off-limits for other people… that's not part of the agenda.  If it is on your agenda then you should stop dicking around and commit yourself for a while because you are obviously in a place where you are not able to have healthy relationships and you need some intensive therapy for you to figure out that you are not God.

Cycles.

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I notice that when I feel bad about something and I don’t act on it because I feel confused/anxious/uncertain about how to handle it I tend to get very fussy and anxious overall and it bleeds over into way more of my life than it should. I tend to hold on to things for a long time in that state building it up into my head until I am so frustrated by it that the smallest hint of an infraction in that direction feels like THAT’S IT!!! I’M DONE WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Often this doesn’t go all that well. When I completely over react like that I feel terrible and guilty and like if I were just a better person I wouldn’t blow up like that. But the situation doesn’t really get resolved and it continues on and the cycle continues.

But if I manage to say my piece in a way that is maybe not perfectly polite but not a complete and total overreaction directed at one person I feel way better about myself. And I will have an easier time enforcing that boundary for a long time afterward. I’m always super happy when I manage to do this.

And just because this is the kind of thing I almost never say–I’ve been doing pretty well lately. I’m having lots of emotional cycles but I’ve not been depressed in quite a while. Frustration seems to be ever present while pregnant though. 🙂

Post-partum vists

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A number of people have asked? informed? me about visiting once the baby comes. Based on the advice I have gotten from women who have been through this before me (see–I do actually listen to advice sometimes) I am going to structure how this works formally and in advance so that I don’t have to negotiate with everyone individually.

-You must set up a time in advance and be punctual. No dropping in because you are “in the neighborhood.”
-During the first two weeks visits will probably be restricted to 30 minutes. After that an hour, maybe an hour and a half until I’m feeling better.
-If you want to come over you need to do something helpful. Bring food. Start/fold a load of laundry. Do dishes.
-I will not be up for being a host and I’m going to be less than thrilled about Noah doing it.
-Soft voices. I’m actually pretty sensitive to noise in general and I’m willing to bet that when I’m adjusting to listening to a baby crying a lot of the time I’m going to be extra fussy on this one. If you see me cringe when you boom out the start of a sentence, please self regulate to a softer volume.
-Leave your drama outside my house for at least the first month. I love you. I will return to listening to other people’s issues after about a month. I will be sleep deprived and probably anxious as I try to figure out what a parent is supposed to do with an infant and I’m always over-sensitive to other people’s emotions.
-Please don’t tell me what I “should do” with the baby. If I know you have parenting experience or even a bunch of siblings there is the possibility I will ask for advice–don’t offer it unasked though. 🙂
-If you have been sick in the past week don’t ask to come visit. The kid will be around for years to come and I promise that you will have lots of chances to bond later. 🙂

See. I’m not rejecting *you*. I’m not being mean to *you*. 🙂

I’m thinking about printing this and putting up on the front door as a reminder.

Good boundaries.

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My mother informed me that she would be coming up to stay with us after the baby comes. I told her that she will not. I said that if she wants to stay with Denise (my sister) or Vonnie (her sister) and visit during the day that is fine, but she is not welcome to stay in my house 24 hours a day right after I have had a kid. I told her that if she tried it I am likely to attempt to kill her and there will be a permanent rift in our relationship. Just No. She took it fairly well actually. She laughed when I said, “Do you really think it is a good idea to be in my face constantly after I have been in that much pain with a bunch of sleep deprivation? Do you think I will have any patience or kindness left in me?!”

Boundaries are my friend. Next time I talk to her I will mention that she also isn’t welcome in the first three weeks as I am trying to figure out how to deal with the Lizard. Her telling me what to do with the Lizard at the beginning is not likely to go over well. If I don’t specifically ask for advice my instinct is to do the opposite of whatever I am told to do. This isn’t a good thing when it comes to caring for my infant so I’m going to avoid the person who will give the most unsolicited advice. 🙂

This shit is going way better than it used to.